Today I attended a Writing Center workshop on using sources strategically. The man who tutored us went by the name of Joshua. He seemed like a really nice person, and as a matter of fact he was. Before the workshop began, Joshua had us all introduce ourselves. I stated that although I was here at the workshop for a freshmen seminar assignment, I also looked forward to learning about how I could use sources more strategically to aid me in a critical literary analysis paper I had to write. While teaching us, Joshua was very concise and to the point. He introduced BEAM to us, which stood for Background, Exhibit, Argument, and Method respectively. These four things were types of primary and secondary sources. I never knew sources could be distinguished in ways other than primary and secondary. Joshua also helped me to realize that whether a source is primary or secondary is mainly dependent on how the writer uses the source. Afterwards, we did some practice on identifying different types of sources using BEAM. Overall, I learned quite a lot from about sources from the workshop and I do look forward to attending other ones in the future.
